About this
artist

Source: Oxford University Press

Canadian painter, draughtswoman, mixed-media artist and installation artist. She studied a set programme of drawing, painting and sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Montreal (1942–6), and later also studied fine art at Black Mountain College, NC (1950–56). She first exhibited at the Bykert Gallery, New York, in 1970. Her early work was Minimalist and process-orientated, for example A, C, and D (1970; New York, MOMA) from the series Group/And. Influenced by mathematics, in particular non-Euclidean geometry, the proportional systems of the golden section, topology, and, later in her career, by the Quattrocento masters and the work of the 16th-century Mannerist Pontormo, Rockburne developed her work into the characteristically aestheticized paintings of interrelated shapes for which she became renowned: in Interior Perspective; Discordant Harmony (1985) structure and surface are both related and unrelated, simultaneously suggesting an order and denying it. Rockburne is also known for her sketches, drawings, watercolours and folded-paper constructions. In the early 1990s she exhibited installations comprising wall paintings in the manner of fresco secco.

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